The Virgin Company (currently editing)

by Pone_Heap

The Northwest Pass, Chapter 8: Blood and Oil

The rain outside was letting up, though this reprieve would be fleeting. Still, it was the first time the platoon saw even a patch of blue sky in a week. It gave them an opportunity to witness something of terrifying power.

After several days of surveying and testing the landscape, the ponies had found few potential opportunities to “drop the mountains on the centaurs”. They lacked the means to do enough damage to the Centauri forces to hold them; anything they could feasibly conjure up would be as a pebble in the road to the advancing army.

So, the ponies were working on a new plan. Their demolitions expert, Pvt. Blood Sapphire—who’d killed more dragons than anypony else alive, apparently—was floating an idea on the more incendiary side of things.

Zip, his sergeants—minus Amethyst, Spcs. Trip Wire and Silver Duster, and Pvts. Linseed Oil and Blood Sapphire walked near the railway. With them was a crystal ball Silver levitated in their midst, allowing Celestia, Gen. Fiddler Dream, and Canterlot’s leaders a view of the coming spectacle.

Blood led the group, looking for something; he spoke to them, the lieutenant in particular, “Oil is even easier to manipulate than blood… has more substance to it—easier to ‘grab’... And it is more than possible to do what we’re thinking, Lieutenant.”

The unicorn stallion sounded tired…

Zip acknowledged, “I wouldn’t imagine it wasn’t…”

Blood’s voice was low, but he was even audible in the light rain, “I never thought I’d do this again…”

Zip walked alongside, “Just keep walking, Blood.”

Blood nodded numbly, the slow movement of his hooves evidence enough of his reluctance as they pushed forward.

Yes, they all recalled, just a bit earlier, how difficult it was for Blood to open up the possibility of burning the centaurs alive as they traveled, unaware of the danger until they began to cook in their own hides.

Blood had something to share; it wasn’t a pretty thing, “My old outfit once encountered a dragon nest in a colony we couldn’t enter, so I did just what we’re considering. I shifted a pocket of oil in the desert to where we wanted, and it surely cooked the eggs when we lit it up.”

“I thought dragon eggs needed heat to develop and hatch…” Silver, the walking encyclopedia, cited.

“Well, not with the accelerant I used,” Blood cheerlessly countered. “It took care of half the colony, actually… the ones that couldn't escape... That wasn’t intentional… The fire got out of control due to a structural anomaly under us… and a lack of foresight… Not all of us got out… and a couple of those that did died later… from the burns.”

“Oh…” Silver blanched.

Zip felt a twinge; he was no stranger to what the fires of Hell could do.

“What a way to go…” Razor shuddered; he’d never been through such an ordeal—and didn’t want to—but what an awful way to die…

The thought filled the others with dread, to say the least.

“Let us keep on task, everypony,” Celestia spoke with authority.

They all clammed up on the matter.

It wasn’t that Celestia was overly upset with their banter… it was the whole situation that had her feeling touchy.

Everypony felt… uneasy… Sure, they were talking about an enemy that had murdered a couple thousand ponies, but… this seemed to cross a line.

Trying to put such things out of mind, they continued to follow Blood.

And Blood found something; he looked around the location, “Ah… this spot’ll do for a demonstration.”

“What are you going to do?” Zip asked; he wasn’t sure on the specifics.

“I’m going to bring the oil to the surface…” Blood nudged the ground. “Plenty of oxygen up here…”

“Will it work?” Jacinta asked.

The staff sergeant didn’t ask because she didn’t believe… It was the surreal feeling the lot of them had rising up their throats… that things… wouldn’t be the same, once they’d selected their supposed path.

If they’d been able to see Blood’s eyes, his feelings of sureness and of revulsion were more than evident; he tried to sound calm, “It’ll work.”

They watched the private continue to examine the area.

Blood pointed to Sgt. Treasure Trove, “Sgt. Trove, please be ready.”

“For what?” the unicorn sergeant wondered.

“The smoke you’ll need to contain...” Blood walked a distance away from the group and poked around; he found something. “Everypony stay where you are. Regardless, Lieutenant… please be ready to contain anything that gets away. We can’t give any indication of anything going on around here; even with the weather, there’s a small chance something besides us will see this.”

Zip jolted, suddenly feeling a little scared, “R- right…!”

They did as they were told and watched in amazement as Blood lit up his horn, concentrating on a patch of land the size of a bed. Oil visibly lifted to the surface.

Running back to the group, Blood shot a spark at the surface oil. Despite the sopping wet ground, the fire roared to life and gave off a thick, inky-black smoke.

The smell was hard to believe.

“Holy shit!” cried Trip as she shuddered, shying away from the flames; she could feel the incredible heat, even 30 feet away.

Sergeant Trove yipped, quickly enveloping the smoke and dissipating it as it billowed about.

Zip made ready to go after any “strays”, but he found Sgt. Trove had things taken care of.

And with another glow of Blood’s horn, the oil must have retreated under the surface, for the fire, deprived of oxygen, went out at once. All that remained was the smoldering, muddy Earth and some steam.

The leaders, one and all, stood shocked at this, from Celestia to Trip.

“Oh, my God…” Jacinta whimpered.

Most everypony else was lost for words.

“I didn’t even have to pull it from that deep,” Blood stated tautly, crumpling to a seated position; he twitched, as if dealing with some pesky insect. “That’s… That’s what I can do, everypony.”

Seeing his friend and squad-member fall to his rump, Razor moved in, “Blood? You alright?”

Blood wasn’t alright… He’d seen what this display could do to other living creatures.

The private was steadied to his hooves; he appeared distressed, to say the least, “Just… give me a minute. That… smell… you never forget… especially when it's followed by the stink of hair and flesh…”

Zip’s eyes were fixed on the still-smoldering patch of ground, “No… No, you don’t…”

He remembered it, well enough, and he was better reminded of it by the stink of burning oil. That sweetly sick tang of his comrades’ burned bodies… the thick stench of their ruined fort. It was something he usually managed to keep from mind, rarely appearing even in his nightmares. Now, it felt real again. But he shook off the feeling as if it were a bothersome fly and tried to center himself.

Blood tiredly motioned to his achievement, “The scale’s not much challenge… just takes longer to set up. And I’ll tell you how it’s done.”

Celestia, stunned a moment, found words, “Why did you never bring this up, Private?”

Zip became nauseous, just thinking about the multitude of reasons. The one that kept forcing its way to the front of his mind was the horror of it.

All the same, nopony faulted her for asking. This was... something else.

Blood felt the same way as Zip, but his chosen answer was a more logical one, “Because it’s so dangerous…”

The private had just told them, moments earlier, of his old crew’s disastrous mission to cook a dragon’s nest; it was very fresh in their minds. Granted, Blood’s former attempt at such a thing was underground, but that did little to quell anypony’s concerns.

And their concerns were many.

General Dream—the consequences of their budding scheme not lost on him—gulped and said, “Well, dangerous it may be, but it’s our best option, it seems. Now, Private, explain what you mean by ‘scale’.”

Blood looked to the General and the princess in the crystal ball, as well as his platoon-mates, “We can rig up the pass to burn in sections. We can square off areas with magic-conductive metal stakes, driven into the ground. Using a multi-channel… device—each linked to a section—with a magic amplifier, we can manipulate the oil in the ground on a small or large scale, anywhere in our created grid, depending on the channels activated. Depending on the conductors… we could pull oil up from a few thousand feet down; that would take a lot of time and concentration. A couple hundred feet wouldn't be all that easy, either, but far more feasible.”

Zip nodded, “So, uh… exactly how much oil is there up here?”

Blood just stared at the ground, looking worse than before, “We’ve covered this, sir… The land is saturated with it. If you’re asking how many times or how long I could ‘pull off this trick’…?”

Zip nodded again, “That’s exactly what I want to know.”

“…” Blood kept his eyes down. “Well… I, uh…”

“Blood?” Linseed used a comforting tone.

As if prodded, Blood quickly recited, “With what’s in the Earth… the fire would last for years, everypony. Even at the surface, there’s enough oil in the soil we could coax up that it would burn for up to a week… And that’s not counting some of the heavier pockets or our horizontally moving them around in the soil. Unless I do some calculations and send a magical probe, I can’t say much about what’s deep down… But I think it’s unnecessary to be so specific, and we needn’t concern ourselves with how much there is; there’s plenty, and I mean plenty, directly under our hooves. It would be easy to accomplish this.

“When I directed the oil into the dragon’s nest, I had to move it about 150 ft. without being detected. We don’t need to do that, here. We just need to pull it to the surface. We put together some magic-conductors… set up a linked-system… and we can control a stretch of the pass as if it was a gas-powered stovetop.”

It came out in a struggle, what he said.

After a few seconds of quiet, Celestia blinked, “Such terrifying power…”

Blood, talking at the air around him, rather than any particular pony, shakily pulled off his shades; he looked squarely at her hologram, “Yes, Princess… It’s the most destructive—and dangerous—procedure with which I’ve worked. And what we hope to accomplish here… if we hope to accomplish it… would be easy, as I’ve said.”

He sounded close to tears.

It was doubtful a single pony wasn’t humbled. None of them had been especially bloodthirsty over doing such a thing, but all the same, the horror…

General Dream cleared his throat, “Well… I think it’s time to put this up for consideration, then… unless anypony wishes to say anything else, first.”

The general turned to the princess, who appeared physically ill.

Celestia gulped hard, “If our survey has yet to yield a feasible way to hinder the Centauri forces… then I think this is our only chance to save Equestria. We… can’t send help… We can’t outrun the winter… and we won’t be able to stand up to the centaurs, given the time we have to prepare in the south…”

Everypony listened in revered silence to this, as not to lose a word.

The princess closed her eyes, “Do we need to put this to a vote?”

This stunned a few ponies. Celestia wasn’t going to use her overriding power and just order them to begin?

“Princess…” Gen. Dream murmured. “A vote?”

Celestia almost sobbed, suddenly, “This is our continent, Fiddler! Our home! All of us! I see no other way, but I will not suffer such horrors upon my ponies without the ponies I trust and rely upon having a say!”

Her outburst was quite unexpected; nopony knew quite what to say.

It took the general a moment to speak again, “Princess… we…”

He trailed off.

But he found words, “Princess, we will follow you in all things. And if you wish for us to consider this, we will.”

“General,” a new voice entered the dialogue.

It was one of the Canterlot strategists.

None of Zip’s ponies could see it, but the strategist stood before Canterlot’s commanders, “General, none of us are opposed to this. It’s… the only way.”

General Dream looked satisfied, though weary, “Thank you, Colonel…”

Zip lowered his head, “I’m not opposed, either… but my command…”

Jacinta came forward, “We’re not opposed, Lieutenant…”

The ponies faces around Zip were evident of that; Zip accepted this, looking around, “We’re not opposed, General. I… trust Sgt. Flare would feel the same.”

Celestia wiped a hoof across her eyes, “But there’s only one pony that can do this… Private Blood Sapphire!”

Blood sat bolt upright, his sunglasses falling from his loose hooves, “Princess?”

Zip had forgotten about Blood, sitting in their midst. This was… stupid, considering this all hinged upon him, in the end.

Celestia’s manner… astonished everypony. She was asking.

“Private Sapphire… Blood… Will you do this great task we ask of you…?”

Blood, his aches and pains and nausea temporarily cast away, slowly stood; he looked Celestia in the eyes and said with great conviction, “I wouldn’t have brought this up if I wasn’t prepared, my Princess… And I will use all my knowledge—all my skills and experience—to stop the Centauri forces in their tracks.”

The unicorn became solemn, “Heaven hear me… there will be no saving them. They will all die. Regardless of what happens to us, they will all die in the north.”

It was possible to say nopony had ever looked so impressive to the collective group.

Celestia slowly nodded, “Then Heaven help us… Let us begin.”

Author's Note:

Check out the Appendix for The Virgin Company, updated as the story moves along. Includes character designs and platoon arrangement. Contains spoilers.

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With Celestia having placed the fate of Equestria in the hooves of 54 ponies, they're set to begin setting up.

With only a couple days of rain left--and the approaching winter--it's a sure thing the centaurs will begin moving in less than a week. How will Zip and his ponies deal with them?

---

If you haven't, please take a look at Larkspur Blossom, my first story. Lt. Screamer is a hero of the main character.

And please look at my adventure story, Princess Essenta. A princess goes on a "fool's errand" to prove to her worth, picking up interesting friends along the way.

Thanks for reading, and take care.

Comments

[Fudgebrownie]

New chapter! I finished it in a single bm. Looking forward to the barbecue.

[Pone_Heap]

9908004
One bm? I suppose it was a short chapter.

[Bjarnulf]

9909015
4Rings of Baumkuchen, 3chocolate-mint cookies and a cup of coffee for you!

I'll hold on to this pizza because it was a short chapter and I'm hungry right now.(guess wich is the lie here...)
Thank you for the new chapter and your hard work.

And now let's wait for the little barbecue and the screams of you!
We might call this Operation Hans.

[Pone_Heap]

9909294
I had a name for the operation, but I may change it to something more interesting.

[Bjarnulf]

9909319
Yes, it's Hans, Hans ze Bratwurster! Don't you dare change the name of Hans now.

[Pone_Heap]

9910382
I never said I'd be naming it "Hans".

[Bjarnulf]

9910646
But,Hans... you can't just give it another name now...
Just imagine giving the operation some epic name, that would be horrible! I had to give you more Baumkuchen.